These are among my favorite pleasures as Summer melts into Autumn. Let them come out ugly, cracked, strangely lobed… just let them come out!!

These red and yellow beauties will be great canned and made into sauces, as Miz LuMena does so wonderfully:

…but right now a couple of them are going to join a few of our garden’s other offerings, cilantro, red onion and deep purple hot peppers, in a swim with invited guests Organic Corn and Back Olives; they won’t know they’re in the “deep end” until the olive oil and balsamic vinegar begin to rise around them, and by the time the Gorgonzola crumbles arrive to finish the job, it will be too late for them, and dinner time for me!

With a couple of free-range chicken thighs grilled over an oak fire, this will be a fine easy dinner for a September evening:

After being in communicado for most of the past week (internet troubles,) Frau B showed up on Saturday and correctly diagnosed the problem as a dead “airport,” apparently not one of Apple’s finer designs…

Anyway, after some scouting around, Lizz hooked up an older unit and we’re back in business.

So here’s a shot from the garden, Rainbow Chard Glowing in Evening Light:

My job, highway and bridge layout, ranges from yawns, generally plentiful during the more mundane aspects of rural road surveys, to screams, which can come fast and furiously when in the throes of building a big, complicated bridge.

I’m presently wrestling with a monster, a disintegrating concrete span which looms in a great curve over an iron railroad bridge which in turn spans the concrete channel of the Hoosic river in its transit of the city of North Adams. It’s a virtual Escher’s World of crumbling concrete pillars being “resurfaced” (yeah, and good luck with that! ) and redecked with new steel beams and a new concrete deck.

We’re at the point now of setting the beams on the east side (Stage II) and they are, you guessed it, RED:

The iron workers scurry about up there seemingly unphased; I, on the other hand, move with a great deal of care and caution, much to their amusement:

That’s not me, but you get the idea – and it gets a good bit higher by the time it crosses the railroad tracks.

I’ll be spending the better part of the next few weeks walking the steel, with the spaces between the beams being gradually filled in with “pans” for the upcoming concrete pours.